ToiletAlex PaperPrager

ToiletAlex PaperPrager is the new edition of Toilet Paper magazine, born from a collaboration with american artist Alex Prager: a vibrant dialogue between visionary minds, where the ironic style of Toilet Paper meets the dark humor of Alex Prager, a parade of familiar yet strange images, suggesting a timeless world placed somewhere between dream and reality.

ToiletAlex PaperPrager magazine is an original project born from the encounter between the visionary world of Toilet Paper and the uncanny imagery of Alex Prager, American artist, director, and screenwriter.

The magazine features a back-to-back of twelve images by Alex Prager and twelve conceived by Toilet Paper: the alluring aesthetics, vibrant colors, and characteristic visual deviations found in Toilet Paper' enhance Pragers universe, and reciprocally so. The artist's exploration of the delicate boundary between reality and fiction, utilizing her unique blend of archetypes, everyday objects, humor, and allegory, forms the core of a tantalizing and enigmatic journey.

This new magazine is in continuity with ToiletMartin PaperParr, a special publication that in 2018 collected the most iconic images from the prolific archives of the internationally renowned artist Martin Parr and the Cattelan-Ferrari duo.

Alex Prager (born 1979 in Los Angeles) is an American photographer and filmmaker. Characterized by deeply saturated colors, heightened drama, and dark humor, Prager's photographs hint at narrative subtexts while maintaining a sense of ambiguity and self-contained emotional intensity. Prager's staged scenes tap into a shared cultural memory drawing inspiration from a wide range of influences and references including Hollywood cinema, experimental films, popular culture and street photography. Her familiar yet strange images suggest a sense of timelessness while also creating a world that synthesizes fiction and reality.

Prager's work has been featured in publications such as Foam Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, American Vogue, W Magazine and Art in America. Additionally, her photographs are in the permanent collection of several major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthaus Zurich, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, among others.

Toilet Paper is an artists' magazine created and produced by Maurizio Cattelan and photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari (Le Dictateur), born out of a passion or obsession they both cultivate: images. Following in the wake of Cattelan's cult publication Permanent Food, the magazine contains no text; each picture springs from an idea, often simple, and through a complex orchestration of people it becomes the materialization of the artists' mental outbursts. Since the first issue, in 2010, Toilet Paper has created a world that displays ambiguous narratives and a troubling imagination. It combines the vernacular of commercial photography with twisted narrative tableaux and surrealistic imagery. The result is a publication that is itself a work of art which, through its accessible form as a magazine, and through its wide distribution, challenges the limits of the contemporary art economy.

Edited by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari (concept and images).
 
Published in May 2024
No text
22,5 x 29 cm (softcover)
40 pages (ill.)
ISBN : 978-88-6208-819-0

© Toilet Paper